Evangelicals

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Plug-In: Game show host with cancer touts prayer, but faith is complicated (Who is Alex Trebek?)

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I have wondered about Alex Trebek’s faith for a while.

My curiosity was piqued last May when the longtime “Jeopardy!” host — battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer — cited prayer as a factor in his “mind-boggling” recovery. He later revealed a setback that required him to undergo more chemotherapy.

In advance of ABC’s special prime-time series "Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time," the 79-year-old Trebek sat down for an interview with Michael Strahan that aired Jan. 2. Yes, the subject of prayer came up. More on that in a moment.

But first, in case you weren’t among the 13.5 million viewers Tuesday night, this is how the competition turned out: Ken Jennings prevailed over fellow quiz show legends James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter and claimed the $1 million prize. The Bible even made a cameo in one of the Final Jeopardy clues.

Back to Trebek: As noted by Newsweek, he talked with Strahan about matters of faith and morality:

"I believe in a higher power....he or she is busy enough looking after more serious problems in the world. But I don't minimize the power of prayer," he said.

"Most of us have an open-ended life. It's no longer an open-ended life, it's a close-ended life," he said, given the poor survival rate for pancreatic cancer.

"I'm not sure I always have this positive frame of mind." He later admitted, "My self-deprecating humor is worth its weight in gold."

So, does Trebek have a specific religious affiliation?

This much is known, as I’ve pointed out before: He grew up in a Catholic household.


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And this just in: Religious left is real, important, rather small and it's old news

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And this just in: Religious left is real, important, rather small and it's old news

Every four to eight years, mainstream journalists start writing hopeful stories about the potential for the religious left — that should be Religious Left — to rise up and save America from the Religious Right.

This is the sort of thing that we write about here at GetReligion and the topic came up again in a post called, “Mayor Pete evolving into Pastor Pete? Prepare for latest uptick in MSM ardor for religious left.” That led to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here, please, to tune that in.

The religious left, of course, has changed and evolved over the decade that I have followed it and reported stories about it. But, basically, we are talking about liberal Mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, a few evolving evangelicals, liberal Jews and so forth and so on.

The problem, of course, is that so many of those ancient doctrines keep clashing with the creeds of the emerging Zeitgeist (mostly the Sexual Revolution, in post-Roe v. Wade America).

Lots of folks who were part of the old religious left go with the flow. But some are troubled. Go to any traditional African-American church and talk to people. Go to a multi-racial Assemblies of God church. Talk to Catholics who go to Vespers and then stay for Confession.

So, White House race after White House race, we see stories about the latest set of “lesser of two evils” challenges faced by people who are, sincerely, religious/moral traditionalists, but they are also economic populists. There are the people who do not exist, according to MSNBC and Fox News. They don’t fit in the Democratic Party’s faculty lounge or the GOP’s country club.

So is the latest attempt to raise up the religious left a valid story?

Of course it is. The African-American church vote really mattered to Barack Obama (think his evolving beliefs on gay marriage) until the moment in time when he no longer needed those votes.

Latino voters matter, as well. Hold that thought!

The religious left also is very important in mainstream newsrooms — at least the ones in which I have worked.


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Gay-rights lawsuit against big seminary ties into '20 elections and pending Supreme Court case

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With 2,900 students, Fuller Theological Seminary in California is one of the world’s largest and most influential clergy training grounds. The evangelical Protestant school believes that biblical teaching requires its faculty, students and staff to limit “sexual union” to marriage “between one man and one woman” while singles observe abstinence.

That moral stance, upheld across centuries in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, now faces substantial legal and political resistance. 

Fuller's policy provoked a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit, high on the developing news docket, that was joined last week by Nathan Brittsan, an American Baptist Churches USA clergyman. Those seeking background can see local coverage here and Religion News Service coverage right here. Fuller expelled Brittsan in 2017, just before he was to begin studies, when it learned about his gay marriage. 

Let’s back up a step. The suit was originally filed last November by Joanna Maxon, a student expelled during her last semester in 2018 after her lesbian marriage came to light. (Click here for Julia Duin’s GetReligion post criticizing Los Angeles Times coverage of Maxon’s complaint.)  

Paul Southwick, the attorney for Brittsan and Maxon, makes a straightforward claim that any religious school that discriminates on the basis of sexual activity by gays and lesbians should be penalized and lose federal aid. He thinks the case “could set an important legal precedent,” and notes that Fuller allowed a student accused of heterosexual sinning to remain enrolled.

Fuller is defended by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The spokesman there said what’s at stake is the right of religions to educate their leaders “free from government entanglement.” There’s potential support in the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2012 Hosanna-Tabor ruling against an Obama Administration bid to deny religious exemption under employment law. 

A different tack against religious schools occurred when the regional accreditation of Gordon College was questioned.


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Mayor Pete evolving into Pastor Pete? Prepare for latest uptick in MSM ardor for religious left

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If you have been paying any attention at all to the 2020 White House race, you were ready for the latest mini-sermon from Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The setting, of course, was the last debate between Democratic Party hopefuls staged before the Iowa caucuses. Here is the key soundbite from Buttigieg, care of CNN, as the frequent churchgoing Episcopalian took yet another shot at Citizen Donald Trump, who — until recently — has been linked to mainline forms of Presbyterianism in great New York City.

Let us attend.

“If he keeps trying to use religion, if a guy like Donald trump keeps trying to use religion to somehow recruit Christianity into the GOP, I will be standing there not afraid to talk about a different way to answer the call of faith,” he said. “And insist that God does not belong to a political party.”

If that kind of language sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that. Consider the top of the recent New York Times feature that ran with this double-decker headline:

Why Pete Buttigieg Has Made Religion Central to His Campaign

The former mayor is not only trying to bridge ground within the Democratic Party, he’s also making a direct appeal to disaffected conservatives who cannot stomach President Trump.

The overture, logically enough, is from a Sunday morning sermonette in which Mayor Pete proclaims:

“Look at what they do,” he said at a campaign stop about 45 minutes outside of Des Moines, calling out Republicans for “using faith as a way to tell some people they don’t belong.”


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Shane Claiborne finally gets his day in the media sun in the Washington Post Magazine

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Although evangelicals have been the flavor of the month for some time in the mainstream media, it’s rare that you see a thoughtful profile on one of them. Conservative evangelicals are distasteful to much of the media on the Eastern seaboard, so the search has been on to find someone who is more palatable to mainstream media tastes.

And thus Shane Claiborne, one of the more interesting Gen X thinkers out there, was a perfect choice for a recent Washington Post Magazine piece.

He’s spent more than two decades living in inner-city Philly; he got some serious cred traveling to Iraq during the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and doing time in Calcutta helping Mother Teresa. He has hung out with the unglamorous poor and stayed on message for a long time.

On a gloomy Tuesday morning in April, the Christian activist Shane Claiborne was in the studio of WCPN, Cleveland’s NPR affiliate, waiting to go on air. The overhead lights glinted off his thick-rimmed glasses. The 43-year-old had spent the past five weeks on a national tour, living on a retrofitted school bus, speaking at community centers and churches every night, trying to accelerate regional movements against gun violence. His collaborator, Mike Martin, a Mennonite blacksmith from Colorado, was sitting to his left…

The story then refers to the verse from Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Claiborne and Martin had been enacting the verse on tour. They were promoting a book they had written — “Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence” — and at every stop, they were using Martin’s forge to convert a rifle into a garden tool. The point was to give communities a chance to grieve, but also to convince them that change was possible. It all reflected the broader project that has made up Claiborne’s career: promoting what might be called an alternative version of evangelical Christianity, one more concerned with social justice than with personal salvation. Or, as he would put it to me later, a bit wryly: “Getting Christians to connect their faith to issues that I think matter to God and are affecting our neighbors.”…


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Plug-In: 7 tips for covering horrific events in houses of worship (and treating victims right)

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I love journalism. I love my fellow journalists.

But as I pointed out in last week’s column on the media barrage faced by minister Britt Farmer after a deadly shooting at his Texas church, I believe we can do better — much better — in how we treat victims.

To help in that regard, I asked four highly respected news professionals — three of them Pulitzer Prize recipients — for advice. Everyone I’m quoting has extensive experience in this area and in making our profession proud.

Based on what they told me, here are seven tips for covering horrific events at houses of worship:

1. How you approach a victim is everything.

“Many mistakes are usually made in the initial approach when journalists are trying to get that quote or sound bite,” said Joe Hight, a Pulitzer-winning editor who is the Edith Kinney Gaylord Endowed Chair of Journalism Ethics at the University of Central Oklahoma. 

“It just doesn’t work like you’re at a public news conference or interviewing a public figure,” added Hight, who hired me at The Oklahoman in 1993 and oversaw our coverage of victims after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. “You are intruding upon private individuals in their most vulnerable moments. In these tragic situations, you have to ask the victims or family members for permission. You need to say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and mean it sincerely. You need to put yourself in the victim’s position of grief and despair after such a tragic situation.

“You need to determine whether the individual is even capable of talking to you at this point or whether you need to step away and approach later. How would you feel if you were asked that question? You don’t want to cause further harm or take advantage of someone in grief just for a quote or sound bite. How you approach will often determine what kind of interview you will get. Do it poorly, and you will possibly cause more damage.”

2. Think long and hard about your call to a victim (and if you really need to make it).

Sensitivity is so crucial.


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Trigger warning! New Crossroads podcast contains dis-United Methodist time travel

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I don’t need to write a new GetReligion post about this week’s “Crossroads,” do I?

After all, this podcast conversation with host Todd Wilken (click here to listen) focuses on why United Methodists on the doctrinal left and right, as well as establishment players in the middle, are now bracing for divorce. In one form or another, I’ve been writing this post since the early 1980s.

What we need is a time machine (I’m a fan of Doctor Who No. 4) so that I could let readers bounce around in United Methodist history and see why all those new headlines about a proposed plan to break-up this complicated church need to be linked to trends and events in the past.

So here we go. Stop No. 1 in this time-travel adventure is Denver, in the year 1980 (care of a GetReligion post with this headline: “United Methodism doctrine? Think location, location, location”).

… It was in 1980 — note that this was one-third of a century ago — that Bishop Melvin Wheatley, Jr., of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church announced … he was openly rejecting his church's teaching that homosexual acts were "incompatible with Christian teaching."

Two years later, this United Methodist bishop appointed an openly gay pastor to an urban church in Denver. When challenged, Wheatley declared: "Homosexuality is a mysterious gift of God's grace. I clearly do not believe homosexuality is a sin."

This date is crucial, because it underlines the fact that the United Methodist Church’s doctrine that homosexual acts are “incompatible with Christian teaching” has been on the books for decades.

That’s why the following passage — from the New York Times a few days ago — is so misleading. The wording here gives the average reader the impression that this doctrine is something that conservatives pulled out of their hats in 2019. This Times report stated that a global split has been:


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About that semi-apology by Chick-fil-A czar: Is this a mainstream news story or not?

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As we approached New Year’s Day, and this new era in GetReligion.org work, religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling started floating some trial balloons in our team’s behind-the-scenes email chatter.

For example, he suggested that we needed to run short, punchy commentary items every now and then when there was an interesting religion-beat story breaking or there was a potential story lurking somewhere in the digital weeds.

Long ago, GetReligion even had a “Got News?” logo for that kind of thing, atop posts that pointed to interesting, potentially newsworthy items in denominational wire services or other alternative sources of religion-beat information.

So what would this look like? Maybe something like this. Have you seen any mainstream news coverage of the leader of Chick-fil-A writing a letter admitting that his company messed up the whole ties-that-bind situation with Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

This story is all over the place in conservative Christian media, but, so far, I’m not seeing anything in the mainstream press. Here is the headline at DISRN: “Chick-fil-A CEO laments “inadvertently discrediting outstanding organizations" in giving strategy switch.”

So is this a story or not? It’s obvious that the original funding shift was a story, because it caused a firestorm in elite media (must-read Bobby Ross post here). Now there is this, care of DISRN:

In an open letter to the American Family Association (AFA), Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy expressed that the company "inadvertently discredited several outstanding organizations" when the fast food giant announced it would be restructuring its philanthropic strategy by halting donations to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last year.

AFA President Tim Wildmon had written Cathy asking if Chick-fil-A would publicly state that both ministries are not hate groups because of their beliefs concerning sexuality, marriage, and family.

Cathy responded:


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After decades of fighting, United Methodists avoid a visit from ghost of the Episcopal future?

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It’s the Methodist question I have heard the most from GetReligion readers (and even locals here in East Tennessee) over the weekend.

I will paraphrase: If the conservatives have been winning the big votes at United Methodist conferences for the past couple of decades, then why are news reports saying that the traditionalists have agreed to “leave the United Methodist Church”?

This is the response that popped into my head a few hours ago after round of news reports, Twitter and online buzz: Basically, I think conservative Methodists have been visited by the Ghost of the Episcopal Future.

Methodist traditionalists are not interested in 50 years of hand-to-hand legal conflict with the entrenched United Methodist principalities and powers. Hold that thought. Meanwhile, I will admit that it’s hard to see the logic of this statement in any one news report. Let’s start with some math from the Associated Press:

Members of the 13-million-person denomination have been at odds for years over the issue, with members in the United States leading the call for full inclusion for LGBTQ people. 

The rift widened last year when delegates meeting in St. Louis voted 438-384 for a proposal called the Traditional Plan, which affirmed bans on LGBTQ-inclusive practices. A majority of U.S.-based delegates opposed that plan but were outvoted by U.S. conservatives teamed with delegates from Methodist strongholds in Africa and the Philippines.

By the way: The numbers in that first paragraph are accurate, as opposed to the following circulated by Reuters: “The United Methodist Church lists more than 13 million members in the United States and 80 million worldwide.” That’s way off, but quite a few online and broadcast outlets picked up that error and ran with it.

Accurate math really is important here. So are the doctrines that are at stake, which are much broader than battles over marriage and sexuality (see my two “On Religion” columns about these trends here, and then here).

The key is two realities that are in constant tension.


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